Former NFL punter Chris Kluwe, the pride of Los Alamitos High, Costa Mesa hobby shop owner and part-time Huntington Beach resident, is calling on Americans to boycott corporate sponsors of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Russia.
Kluwe, a married father who became a national advocate for gay marriage and gay people after writing a scathing Deadspin article, supports a ban because of Russia's anti-LGBT laws.
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@ChrisWarcraft, as the avid gamer is known on Twitter, made his views known in an Ad Week interview.
“It's unfortunate that this has to be the case,” he said of boycotting sponsors, “but the IOC [International Olympic Committee] is really trying to crack down on athletes, saying no protests are allowed. The way to make the IOC listen—and abide by its own charter that talks about inclusiveness and nondiscrimination—is to go through the sponsors. If the sponsors are losing money, they'll complain to the IOC. The Olympics shouldn't be held in countries that commit human rights violations.”
Kluwe also hopes to see some protests from athletes at Sochi. “Anything they can do, like giving interviews, trying to raise awareness of the issue, skirting what the IOC considers political,” he says. “But I'll understand if no one does.”
He is involved with Principle 6, a campaign and merchandising line created to denounce the Russian laws by highlighting the Olympic charter's written nondiscriminatory principle.
The Ad Week interview ends with Kluwe's Super Bowl prediction. Let's just say if your a 12th Man, you'll be happy.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.